srdiamond comments on Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence - Less Wrong

59 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 18 March 2012 03:53AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 20 March 2012 12:35:26AM *  1 point [-]

It seems to me that you're trying to bridge the gap between arguments which are logically false no matter what (A implies B, therefore B implies A) and arguments which require some knowledge of the world in order to evaluate them.

The answer to this observation and the seeming impossibility of bridging the gap, I think, is that the pure formal validity of an argument manifests only in artificial languages. The "fallacies" are part of the study of informal reasoning. But as such, their acceptability always depends on background knowledge. The strictures of "informal logic" should be applied (and in ordinary rational discourse, are implied) in a more graded, Bayesian fashion; but they were developed assuming a closer relation than really exists between formal and informal reasoning.